than having his picture taken. Caesar looked at the image of his father-a man on the verge of becoming old. His sister's letter had even less in it than the lawyer's: "Write to me, or call me collect, whatever is best for you, dear one. Call even if you are on the other side of the world. For every step you take to get to me, I will walk a mile toward you." He had an enormous yearning at first, but after two weeks he tore every- thing up and threw it all awa)T. He would be glad he had done this as he stumbled, hurt and confused, out of his sister's car less than hili a year later. The girl and the boy would be in the back seat, the girl wearing a red dress and black shoes, and the boy in blue pants and a T-shirt with a cartoon figure on the :&ont. The boy would have fallen asleep, but the girl would sa)) "Nighty-night, Uncle," which she had been calling him all that everung. A n ex-offenders' group, the Light at the End of the Tunnel, helped him to get a room and a job washing dishes and busing tables at a restaurant on F Street. The room was in a three- story building in the middle of the 900 block of N Street, Northwest, a building that, in the days when white people lived there, had had two apart- ments of eight rooms or so on each floor. Now the first-floor apartments were un- inhabitable and had been padlocked for years. On the two other floors, each large apartment had been divided into five rented rooms, which went for twenty to thirty dollars a week, depending on the size and the view. Caesar's was small, twenty dollars, and had hili the space of his cell at Lorton. The word that came to him for the butchered, once luxuri- " " Th ous apartments was warren. e room- ers in each of the cut-up apartments shared two bathrooms and one nice- sized kitchen, which was a pathetic place because of its dinginess and its fifty-watt bulb, and because many of the appli- ances were old or undependable or both. Caesar's narrow room was at the :&ont, facing N Street. On his side of the hall were two other rooms, the one next to his housing a mother and her two chil- dren. He would not know until his third week there that along the other hall was Yvonne Miller. There was one main entry door for each of the complexes. In the big room to the left of the door into Caesar's com- plex lived a man of sixty or so, a pajama- clad man who was never out of bed in all the time Caesar lived there. He could walk, but Caesar never saw him do it. A woman, who told Caesar one day that she was "a home health -care aide," was always in the man's room, cooking, cleaning, or watching television with him. His was the only room with its own kitchen setup in a small alcove--a stove, icebox, and sink. His door was always open, and he never seemed to sleep. A green safe, three feet high, squatted be- side the bed. "I am a moneylender," the man said the second day Caesar was there. He had come in and walked past the room, and the man had told the aide h " h li " b k. " I to ave t at young on come ac am Simon and I lend money," the man said as Caesar stood in the doorwa)T. "I will be your best friend, but not for :&ee. Tell your friends." H e worked as many hours as they would allow him at the restau- rant, Chowing Down. The remainder of the time, he went to movies until the shows closed and then sat in Franklin Park, at Fourteenth and K, in good weather and bad. He was there until sleep beckoned, sometimes as late as two in the morning. No one bothered him. He had killed two men, and the world, especially the bad part of it, sensed that and left him alone. He knew no one, and he wanted no one to know him. The fiiends he had had before Lorton seemed to have been swept off the face of the earth. On the penultimate day of his time at Lorton, he had awoken terrified and thought that if they gave him a choice he might well sta)T. He might find a life and a career at Lorton. He had sex only with his right hand, and that was not very often. He began to believe, in his first days out of prison, that men and women were now speaking a new language, and that he would never learn it. His lack of confidence extended even to whores, and this was a man who had been with more women than he had fingers and toes. He began to think that a whore had the power to crush a man's soul. "What kinda language you speakin, honey? Talk English if you want some." He was thirty-seven when he got :&ee. 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